Archive for the ‘User Experience’ Category

A website usability audit can be a great marketing tool

Everyone wants to be billing their clients and I’m sure thinking up some good ways to justify this is a major occupation. Well we here at IntuitionHQ have a solution: consider a usability audit of a client’s website that includes a few simple suggestions on how to improve the usability of their website.

So where are the billable hours coming from? Not too many are going to come from the usability testing itself. IntuitionHQ makes usability testing incredibly easy. Within a few minutes you can create a number of tests on the usability of a website and send it to a group of respondents. Results are compiled instantly and you can gain immediate insights from the usability test. Usability testing will highlight your web development skills and is a great marketing opportunity for you to leverage implementing the improvements to your clients website.

Here is our guide to a usability audit that is easy to put together, easy to interpret, will give you billable hours and some great reasons to pick up even more work from your client. Don’t forget that your client and their website visitors are the ultimate beneficiaries, as Amazon’s much fabled $300 million dollar button proves.

Step 1: Spend a few minutes analysing the website

Websites have differing functions. An ecommerce site should make it easy to register, navigate, and purchase goods and services. A traditional store may need to build a community while it provides simple advice of location and purpose. Most companies want to give customers information to avoid costly call centre calls.

Whatever the purpose, look for a few obvious things on the website that look a little dated. Usability thinking has come on hugely in the last few years and a website more than 3 years old will need few tweaks. For some really useful insight on how to get started check out these 7 great tips for writing usability questions

Step 2: Develop some easy website usability tests

Did you know that people are much more likely to click on a contact button with a picture of a person on it? This has been widely tested in usability studies and you can prove it to your client with an easy usability test run using IntuitionHQ:

Does the website have a main picture in the website? You can run a quick A/B preference test on whether the current picture is preferred or an alternative:

A simple example we ran was on whether the cat or dog was cuter:

If a website requires a specific task of visitors, then testing how long it takes visitors to accomplish this task compared to an improved design can show how website usability can be improved.

In the example below, the respondents are shown either the website on the left or the right. They are asked where to click to find the blog and IntuitionHQ automatically times how long it takes for respondents to click on the blog button. You can see that the respondents shown the website on the right found the blog button almost twice as fast as those shown the website on the left.

Conclusion

Taking the initiative and proactively using a usability audit on a customer website will provide a great marketing opportunity for you. You’ll be able to engage them on a range of ways you can improve their website with the benefits sure to follow for their website users.

In today’s interview we’re going to talk with Craig Tomlin, one of the 3000 Certified Usability Analysts (CUA) in the world. Craig is a very active blogger and has written dozens of blog posts about usability.

Craig is an incredibly experienced usability expert, he’s vice-president of one of the largest independent search-driven marketing companies in the United States and has headed up some really impressive user experience projects.

So who better to explain usability than Craig.

The interview

Would you give a brief introduction about you?I’ve been in the online marketing and user experience space for over 15 years now. I started waaaay back in the days before there was a Google, or a Yahoo, or Mobile, and “broadband” meant you had the latest tool, a 56k dial up modem! I’ve done web marketing, redesign or user experience projects for big and small companies over the years, including Blue Cross, Countrywide Home Loans, Disney, Kodak, Prudential Insurance and many more. I like to say that I’ve become quite good at what I do because I’ve learned from ‘experience,’ in other words I’ve made just about every mistake you could make and have learned what not to do!

As one of only 3,000 CUAs in the world, how did you initially get involved with usability?Being a Certified Usability Analyst was a big deal for me because way back when I received my CUA there were very few courses focused on usability and user experience design that I could take. Most of the courses back then were PhD tracks, and were either focused on psychology, or on engineering.

HCI* had been around a long time, but with a full-time job I found it difficult to get a Masters and then Doctorate in HCI. I knew I needed education in UX and usability because I learned quickly that website design is far more than just a pretty website with brochureware. To create a successful web experience, you must know who’s trying to use the site, what critical tasks website visitors have, their “mental model” and much more.

All of that coming of course from understanding and applying user research and design best practices. The CUA courses and certification helped provide me that of training. But I fully recognize that the more I learn, the more I realize I don’t know! It’s an ever expanding subject.

* Human Computer Interaction

As vice president of Apogee Results you have studied, tested and honed the art of influencing people’s behavior. Which steps would you recommend to bulletproof an UX strategy?The answer is somewhat simple, yet hard to execute: “know your users.” Strategy comes from identifying goals, both the goals of the business and the goals of the users. Good websites (or applications or devices) meet and hopefully beat users’ expectations and needs. A successful UX strategy comes from applying those goals and expectations to a design based on:

Using a unique understanding of who will be interacting with the experience

Identifying what their tasks and expectations are

Fully leveraging their mental map

Evaluating their domain expertise

Good UX strategy fully uses that understanding to deliver an experience that meets, or hopefully beats, those expectations.

On your blog usefulusability.com you address several usability topics. What do you think is currently a hot trend that UX practitioners should be aware of?
Without a doubt the next hot trend we all must come to grips with when dealing with UX is understanding that “user experience” does not mean just “web site experience” or “mobile experience” or “phone experience” or “store experience.” Separately, these are all experiences, that’s true, but sadly most companies design each experience in a vacuum, seldom putting together the holistic understanding of how users actually interact with Brands. But put them all together, and they represent the real “user experience,” which can be called the Brand Experience.

What’s a Brand Experience? Think about a person who wishes to purchase a car. She may go to several websites to evaluate prospective car brands. She may go into a showroom to test drive a couple cars. She may ask friends on Facebook or other social sites about their opinions. She may evaluate features of cars on her smart phone multiple times. Eventually she will go to the finalist car lot and interact with the dealer to purchase her car. Given that she has interactions that transcend any single experience, why would we design the user experience she has with the website without consideration of the other critical interactions she will have during her process of purchasing a car?

Good Brands, and good UX designers, understand the holistic nature of user experience and include multiple interaction points in their thought process as they develop their UX strategy. I think that’s the next big thing in UX.

Can you tell us the difference between market segmentation and persona development?
Most marketing organizations in firms have a good sense of creating target markets based on market segmentation. They may use clustering to identify like-groups or set of prospects based on various data. The data is typically not task-specific, it may range from geographic information (all people living in New Zealand) to demographic (all people older than 30 years) to psychographic (all people who intend to purchase in less than 6 months). This data can then create a market segment that marketers can use to try to reach the intended audience (all people living in New Zealand, over age 30, who intend to purchase in less than 6 months).

Personas however are quite different. I like to think of a Persona as a fictional representation of a typical user, in which the common element that defines the Persona is a critical task (or tasks). Personas have names, they have faces, they have a story and a critical task. And Personas have the ability to be used broadly across an enterprise for purposes other than designing a website or mobile user experience. A good Persona, if done well, can be used to make design decisions across the holistic Brand Experience. For more information about Personas see my Useful Usability post on the Forrester report of Personas.

How can two, three, four or even five user profiles represent the entire user community?
This is a common question I receive from developers and those in I.T. I believe they confuse Personas with Use Cases. The most common question is; “If you’ve identified four Personas, does that mean I need four different websites?” The short answer is: Yes, and no.

Yes, in theory it would be great to have a website experience aligned directly to the needs of each Persona. However, often this is not possible from either a business or Brand standpoint. So, one website has to fill the needs of all Personas.

But how? The answer is by making sure you address at least the initial critical task that each Persona is seeking on your home page and other pertinent pages. One website, if the information architecture and related navigation systems are set up correctly, can handle each of the needs of multiple Personas.

What do you think?

We want to thank Craig again for making time to answer our questions. His ideas on focussing more on the holistic understanding of how users interact with brands are definitely insightful and something we should be aware of as UX designers.

What do you think? Do you use personas to represent your entire user community? Feel free to share your opinions in the comments below, on Twitter @IntuitionHQ or at Facebook.com/IntuitionHQ.

Does your site look great on mobile devices? Is it usable on mobile? Increasingly mobile devices are replacing our computers for daily tasks, and because of this web design and development is evolving further.

Since Ethan Marcotte published his article in 2011 about responsive web design, we’ve entered a new phase in web design for mobile. Some might see responsive web design as just another trend, but here at IntuitionHQ we believe it’s more than just a trend, we believe responsive web design might just become one of the most important changes to web design in 2012.

But what does responsive web design really mean? Time to ask an expert in this field – Brad Frost. We first spoke with Brad a few months ago after reading his posts about responsive design and usability on his blog.

Brad’s a very busy guy, aside from writing for A List Apart and his blog, doing interviews with IntuitionHQ and thenextweb, he’s also one of the speakers at the upcoming Mobilism conference on May 10th in Amsterdam!

We think his views on responsive web design offer great insight on this new trend. So let’s talk responsive web design.

The interview

Could you give a brief introduction about you?I’m a mobile web strategist and front-end designer at R/GA in New York. I’ve been focusing on creating mobile-optimized websites for a few years now and spend a great deal of time learning and talking about what goes into good mobile web experiences. I made a website that tries to make sense of this stuff. I’m also a musician (primarily a bass player) and an artist. I live in Brooklyn with my wonderful wife. She’s just as busy as I am.

What is the biggest usability challenge for the mobile web?
I think the biggest challenge for the mobile web is achieving content parity. For a long time the default mentality was that mobile users don’t want everything desktop users want. As a result, important content would get arbitrarily lopped off and mobile users were penalized for how they happened to be accessing the web. The biggest challenge then becomes to deliver a full experience while being mindful of the many constraints the mobile environment creates.

Can you tell us a bit more about responsive web design? Ethan Marcotte coined the term “responsive web design” and he broke it down to three components: fluid grids, flexible media and media queries. However it’s evolved into something much bigger than that. It’s become a language with which to talk about designing beyond a singular screen size and context.

Before the term “responsive web design” was around, my colleague Jack Bishop and I were using the term “adaptive web design” as a way to talk about how an experience adapts to device features and browser capabilities. As it turns out, at the same time Aaron Gustafson was writing a book titled Adaptive Web Design, which dives deep into the concepts of progressive enhancement. And that’s what a lot of this is about, just applying those concepts to more contexts.

What does responsive design mean for the future web?
It’s becoming increasingly challenging to create and maintain separate experiences for different contexts. You turn your head for a second and BOOM—there’s fifteen new mobile devices announced—all with different screen sizes, form factors, browsers and more. Because devices, browsers and capabilities are such moving targets, we need to find solid ground to stand on. That means focusing on creating flexible foundations that provide a good user experience to a number of different contexts. So instead of maintaining multiple websites that all essentially do the same thing, we’re trying to create smarter websites that have the power to go more places.

Looking down the road it becomes even harder to predict what’s coming down the pipes. Technology is constantly building on itself and we have to deal with the breakneck speed of innovation. Anyone who claims to know what the landscape is going to be like in five years is full of it. The fact that the future is so impossible to predict is why it becomes incredibly important to design experiences that are compatible with more scenarios—present and future.

What are some of the pitfalls responsive design is faced with?
There are plenty of pitfalls and challenges that responsive design faces. First, I think that responsive web design is viewed as a panacea for mobile design by a lot of people. It’s not and it never claimed to be. Creating contextually-aware experiences requires a hell of a lot more than just adjusting layout. Sure, it’s a piece of the puzzle, but there’s other things that need addressed. User goals can change dramatically based on context, so serving up a one-size-fits-all experience to mobile users runs the very real risk of not giving the user what they need.

For example, a blog’s content is to make a readable experience for as many screens as possible, but what about an e-commerce website? A user could be at home on a laptop trying to buy a product, but what about a mobile user? Sure, they could be at home on the couch trying to buy the product too, but they could just as well be at the mall looking at the physical product and are trying to read reviews and compare prices. For that user, the “add to cart” button isn’t as important as quick and easy access to price, ratings and reviews. I feel that these are the things we need to consider when designing adaptive experiences. Ask yourself “Why might this mobile user be visiting this site right now? What are they trying to do and what can I do to help them?”

Another big challenge is performance. I mentioned before how we shouldn’t arbitrarily lop off content for mobile users. Well, responsive design fixes that problem (unless you’re using display: none; to hide content for small screens, which you shouldn’t be doing), but it can create big performance issues. Forcing mobile users to download a ton of scripts, media and content just doesn’t make a good experience. That’s why we advocate mobile-first responsive web design, which entails tackling the constraints of the mobile environment first then build up a core experience from there. Conditionally introduce heavier media and scripts when the scenario can accommodate them, instead of trying to cram a desktop site into a mobile-sized screen.

There’s a lot more challenges to responsive design as well: it’s costs more money to produce up front, it requires rethinking the design process, it’s hard to create truly great mobile experiences without compromising the larger screen experiences and vice-versa, etc. There’s a lot of challenges, but that’s not a good reason to shy away from adaptive design. We just need to tackle these issues head on and collaborate to figure this stuff out. Because the other options simply don’t scale.

How do you approach the actual design when developing a responsive website?
Get designs into the browser as soon as possible. That’s not to say that you can’t use Photoshop or static wireframes, it’s just that those things don’t paint a realistic picture of how things will adapt. We’ve traditionally followed a waterfall process, but you simply can’t do that for adaptive experiences.

Typically we map out the experience in wireframes and articulate where the experience will split based on the capabilities of the device/browser (for example, here’s how the carousel looks on non-touch devices, but here’s how the interaction changes when touch gestures are supported).

From there we’ll create a working prototype while the visual design team is in Photoshop creating the general look and feel. By the time the visual team has the look and feel in a good spot, the prototype team has the basic site architecture built. The prototype team starts implementing the look and feel while the visual team moves forward with the rest of the design. From there it becomes a series of iterations and back-and-forth between all the designers. The visual team is one step ahead of the prototype team, who’s focused on implementing the previous round of visual designs. It’s not this cut-and-dry though, because the prototype greatly influences the visual design and lots of things often need revisited. It’s all about back-and-forth.

Three things make a responsive process work: collaboration, collaboration, collaboration. It requires everyone being on board with the approach, tackling problems and being willing to revisit designs in order to make them work. This is much different than the traditional waterfall process, where developers working at the end of the line are left with a lot of the burden of figuring out how to make static designs work.

Does responsive design influence content?Absolutely. All of a sudden, our content needs to be relevant to a whole lot more contexts. We need to be a lot more considerate about how we handle content hierarchy, media and interactions across a ton of screens and scenarios.

Are images still legible on mobile screens? Is there text in the images and is it still readable? Is the image a landscape image whose subject matter becomes tiny on a small screen? Data visualization is currently a hot trend right now, and whenever I fire up these massive JPEGS on my phone I can barely make out any of the text and charts.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher beautifully articulated the challenges of content hierarchy in her post Responsive-ready content. She demonstrates how it’s natural to want to throw sidebar content underneath the main page info, but that it doesn’t necessarily make sense in all circumstances. How layout breaks can very much influence how the user receives the information, so we need to be thoughtful with regards to content hierarchy.

I think the best way to deal with all of this is again to start mobile-first and make sure that all the content on the page is relevant. The less moving parts we have to deal with, the better. Mobile is a great excuse to clean house and gut the bullshit. We have a tendency to fill space with something, anything, if we have the chance. Thankfully we don’t have that luxury on these mobile screens so we’re forced to make some hard decisions. Once that exercise is done, then think of how to take advantage of extra space as it becomes available.
As one of the undersigned on Future friendly, can you tell us a bit more about the idea behind the site?The idea behind the site is that the future is unpredictable, so we need to be more considerate of this change as we create web experiences. We shouldn’t bemoan the fact that there’s more connected devices we need to care about, but rather we should embrace this diversity and use it as an opportunity to reach more people.

The fact that no one knows what’s around the corner is why the site is intentionally ambiguous. When we all of came together, we realized that there’s no silver bullet to these problems. We gave some ways people can think differently in order to become more future friendly, but again, these aren’t prescriptive solutions. It was made more to capture a notion than to say “do this or else!” Ultimately, it’s just there to get people to be considerate and to get more brains working on these hard issues.

Any favorite sites or resources you’d like to share with us?
There’s no shortage of great resources out there, and I’ve been doing what I can to collect them on my Mobile Web Best Practices resources site. I also think Twitter is such an invaluable tool for all this. There’s tons of wonderful people willing to share their experience, thoughts and resources. The collective conversation and collaboration that happens on a daily basis is essential to making sense of these really big challenges. It’s really exciting to listen and participate.

What do you think?

Our thanks go to Brad for his time and insights. We will be keeping an eye out for his upcoming speaking event at Mobilism.

We believe responsive design is a new and exciting trend we all need to be aware of. With the growth of different mobile devices, we can no longer design for just one or two different mobile devices.

What do you think about responsive design? Do you have any interesting insights to share? Feel free to let us know what you think about responsive design in the comments below, on Twitter @IntuitionHQ or at Facebook.com/IntuitionHQ.

Use IntuitionHQ for usability testing to increase your team and your stakeholders’ involvement in the design process. We’ll help you make the design approval process less painful by explaining how. We’ll also give you some ideas about how you can familiarise your team and stakeholders with your design as it evolves.

The scenario

You’ve met with your client and their stakeholders and everyone has agreed what your site design needs to achieve. Armed with this information you have produced a design that you believe fulfills all requirements. Your client circulates your design to the highest level of stakeholder only to find that the person at the top of the chain doesn’t like it. You then spend additional time iterating the design until the senior stakeholder is happy. A process that should have been straightforward has now taken way longer than expected.

What could you have done differently?

socialise your design

an IntuitionHQ usability test on your wireframes

your graphic design

Socialising your designSocialise your design, get your design out there at every opportunity you can. According to Wikipedia, the mere-exposure effect is a psychological phenomenon by which people tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar with them, so expose the highest level stakeholders to the design right from the outset.

Start with wireframes
Try starting right from the wireframe stage. Expose your wireframes to your senior stakeholders by creating a test in IntuitionHQ. This involves stakeholders right from the start and lets them contribute to the design process by providing structured feedback.

A usability test on your wireframes also allows your senior stakeholder to start becoming familiar with the design as it evolves. You might like to produce an A-B test or a preference test using IntuitionHQ. In an A-B test 50% of your testers see one design and 50% the another so that you can use test results to gauge which design works best. In a preference test two versions of a design or aspects of a design are presented side by side and the tester is asked to click on their preference. A preference test can enable your testers/stakeholders to have a direct input to the design direction.

Graphic design
Similarly once you have your graphic design make sure you expose it to the senior stakeholder as early and often as possible. Often people will become distracted by surface features (like colour) when feeding back on a design. If you’ve exposed your site design including navigation and layout as early and often as possible you’ll find your senior stakeholder will be engaged in how the design works for the user rather than becoming bogged down by personal colour preferences or particular graphic aspects. Think about displaying your design on a wall in the office, and have it present at each meeting during the design phase.

So get your design out there:

start early, expose it often

have the stakeholder involved in testing

have stakeholders think about what the design needs to achieve rather than about colours and other design elements

present the design at each stage

We’ve found the design process and design approval is a far smoother task when we involve the senior stakeholder early and often.

Creating a new revenue stream using IntuitionHQ is easy. Offering quick and easy usability tests for your clients adds credibility to your business. We often add usability tests during the early design phase. Not only does this ensure that you catch any problems early, it shows the client that you are professional and proactive, adding to your credibility.

By running tests on your design work with real users as it’s in progress, you get instant feedback on where they’re succeeding and where they’re failing – information you can use to guide the next stage of design. Making usability testing a part of the project process means you can find out whether the design works or not before launch.

Usability results from testing an established website can ensure your design is continuing to serve the needs of users or can highlight the need for any site enhancements. Results can also be very useful at the outset of a redesign in order to help inform requirements.

We suggest you take the following steps to provide 10 hours of usability testing to your client:

Show your clients the value of usability testing

Create a usability test with IntuitionHQ

Report on test results

Step 1: Showing clients the value of usability testing

The results of usability testing can provide valuable insights into the user experience on your client’s site at various stages, from the inception of a new website to post launch and beyond. Here are some suggestions for when and how usability testing can provide valuable feedback:

As a part of the design process
Usability testing before the design is finalised and passed over to the developer can help spot potentially expensive oversights and mistakes before they’re built. It’s also an easy way for your clients to engage with the design process. They can share tests with stakeholders and key audiences just by sending out a link, and understand the results at a glance. It’s cost and time efficient for them and for you.

When a client is considering a redesign/refresh
Usability consultancy based on your client’s current design will help to inform design decisions and concepts for a redesign/refresh prior to the start of design work. This a great starting point for the requirements gathering phase of a project using real life user feedback.

Site tracking statistics analysis
Analysis of site tracking statistics can highlight issues in navigation and general usability. For example analysis of top searches may reveal that some navigation items need to be more prominent on the site. Usability testing results can inform the nature of the changes and testing of proposed changes can confirm the effectiveness of changes prior to any work taking place.

Website feedback surveys
Incorporation of an IntuitionHQ usability test during a period of user consultation such as a feedback survey provides feedback on site structure and design, highlighting any potential issues.

Step 2: Creating a test

Assess site aims
Sit down with your client and establish both their aims and their user’s aims for the website. These may have changed since the last time your client considered them. Check ‘What to test‘ for ideas on what you should focus on during this discussion. The conclusions from this meeting will help inform the areas of the site to focus on while writing tasks in IntuitionHQ.

Using the conclusions drawn from meeting your client, gather your screenshots and write tasks that correlate to your client and user’s aims for the website. For some really useful insight on how to get started check out these 7 great tips for writing usability questions.

Step 3: Report on test results

Produce a usability report
Produce a usability/user experience report for your client using test result screenshots and drawing conclusions from the tester interactions shown in test results. Make recommendations based on your conclusions. Recommendations can include changes in navigation, design changes and possibly new functionality. Here’s a Usability results example report, produced using IntuitionHQ test results, to get you started.

In terms of value to your client the usability testing you provide will pay for itself by increasing user productivity on their site. The easier a site is to use, the faster a visitor can complete the task they came to do, and the happier they’ll be. Happy customers are repeat customers.

Using IntuitionHQ to carry out usability testing is simple and provides great value to your client, so why not get started!

We’ve talked a lot about why you should undertake usability and user experience testing and what to consider when doing so, but we thought it was about time we gave you a quick guide to getting started with IntuitionHQ and how to set up a website usability test using IntuitionHQ .

One of our aims when we built IntuitionHQ was ensuring that the tool itself made it straightforward to set up a usability test, we hope you agree that we’ve made it as simple and intuitive as we can.

Step 1: Log into your account on IntuitionHQ

Sign into your account by clicking on the right top corner ‘Login here’.

Complete your signup details and click ’Login’.

Step 2: Setting up your test

Once you’ve logged in to IntuitionHQ you’ll be directed to the dashboard. The dashboard displays 3 tables; Published projects, Draft projects and Finished projects. Tests are referred to as projects throughout the site. You can revisit the dashboard at any time via the navigation if you need to reference any of these categories. Now though, we’re going to set up a new project. Click the New project button:

You’ll be presented with a screen showing a form to complete with information about your project:

Enter a name for the project (the name will display on the resulting published test). The name will auto populate the completion of the test url in the next box, you can change this if you wish, this will form the unique url for your test and will be the web address you send to testers. The introduction field is already populated with generic text that can be edited using the WYSIWG editor. Similarly the Thank you message is also pre populated and editable.

Step 3: Entering questions and screenshots

Once you’ve set up your project you’ll be directed to the Project overview screen.You can add screenshots and tasks in any order you wish. For example you may want to enter all your screenshots first then write the associated tasks. However if you already have a good idea of the text for your tasks you can add a question and a screenshot at the same time.

Click Add task, write your task in the Question for task box and then either choose an existing screenshot (if you have already uploaded screenshots these will show in a dropdown) or upload one from your computer by clicking Choose file. Then either save and return to the project overview screen or click Save & new task to go directly to a new task screen.

Save your task or add another task to your project by clicking Save & New Task:

If you choose to Save and & new task a blank Question for task screen will display. If you select Save you will be directed to the Project overview> Tasks screen.

You can edit both tasks and screenshots from the project overview screen by clicking the Edit button beside the item you want to change. Similarly you can also delete a task or screenshot by clicking the delete button beside the item in the Project overview.

Step 4: Preview and publish

Preview and publish options are on the top right of the Project overview screen:

Previewing your project will allow you to see the test as your testers will see it. You can then go back and edit any questions that you feel need amendments.

Once you are happy that the test is ready to go live – click Publish, a screen giving you the option to promote the test via Facebook will appear. If you choose to promote the test via Facebook you will be directed to log into Facebook.

If you don’t want to promote via Facebook at this stage uncheck the Publish on facebook box, you will be directed back to the Project overview screen where you will see a success message. Your test is now live and anyone who has the URL can now see it.

Copy the project link into an email, a tweet and post a link to it on Facebook in order to direct users/testers to where to take the test.

You also have the option to publish the results of the test in order to distribute a link to the results if you wish. Click the Publish link beside ‘Results are private to show’ a live url for results:

We hope you’ve found this quick guide useful and we’d be grateful for any feedback you have on the process to create a project and publish a test in IntuitionHQ. Our next quick guide in a couple of weeks will focus on looking at test results.

As some of you may remember, we’ve won a trip to San Francisco and the time is soon approaching that we will be winging on our merry way. Nathan, the founder of IntuitionHQ, and I (Jake) will be heading over for a month from the 15th of November till the 12th of December.

We’ve got a few plans while we are there, but we’d love to take some time to meet our users, potential users and all interested parties while we are in the area. We’d also love your suggestions on what places to go (for business purposes, of course) while we are there. If you run a startup and you’ve done the SF thing before, we’d really love your advice on how to get the most value out of our trip.

We are going to be working out of The Landing Pad located in the SoMa District – you can see the location in the map below:

While we’re in San Francisco, we are going to be living in the Mission District (and on the lookout for iPhone 5 prototypes), and we’re planning on getting bikes so we should be pretty mobile between home, the Landing Pad, and the rest of San Francisco.

If you are going to be in San Francisco between the 15th of November and 12th of December, we’d love to hear from you, and hopefully meet up while we are there. If you’d like to meet us and talk about usability, user experience, web design and the internet, hit us up. You can leave a comment on this page, email us, send us a Tweet @IntuitionHQ or leave a comment on our Facebook page.

If you’ve got any suggestions for places to go, and great tech/geek hangouts we’d love to hear those as well. Our month over there is going to be all about our business, so we’d love all and any suggestions that you might have.

Please read on to see his answers, and to learn a little more about Usability in the design community:

An interview with Jake Rocheleau

User experience is truly the most important topic to consider because we build applications for the user. Without anybody to access the Internet our websites would empty scripts idling on a server somewhere. - Jake Rocheleau

Would you give us a brief introduction of yourself?

I’m a freelance writer and web developer out of eastern Massachusetts. I’m currently 20 years old, have been working in web design & development for about 5 years.

How did you get involved with usability/user experience/design?

I took my first class in basic HTML and web design at the age of 15. I quickly moved on to JavaScript/jQuery, CSS, and backend PHP/MySQL. This gave me the skills to build a couple web apps in my free time. This also introduced me to the world of freelancing where I began to work on a laundry list of UI design projects.

Why do you think usability and user experience are important?

User experience is truly the most important topic to consider because we build applications for the user. Without anybody to access the Internet our websites would empty scripts idling on a server somewhere. And it’s always simpler to make a good interface look pretty.

The study of building a productive user experience isn’t very tough, either. Most of the ideas are common sense processes. But it does take some practice to apply these into your own design work, for web or mobile or whatever.

Any words of wisdom to people learning about UX and usability?

Stay true to what you feel is right. You’ll always get scattered feedback from users, so take this with a grain of salt. Usability is always about the easiest and quickest route to completing a task. Keep this in mind when you design interfaces and you can’t go wrong!

What do you think?

How does this line up with your experience? Do you have any interesting insights to share? Who do you think we should interview in the future? We’d love to hear your feedback in the comments below, on Twitter @IntuitionHQ, or at Facebook.com/IntuitionHQ.

Thanks again to Jake for answering our questions, and don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS feed to follow the next in our series of interviews.

Next in our series we have an interview with Des Traynor of Intercom.io – a fantastic web app for managing relationships with people in web apps, Contrast.ie, where he blogs about a lot of things related to design and usability, and on Twitter @DesTraynor. He’s a very interesting fellow, and I suggest you have a look at those two sites – you’ll immediately see how much care they put in to developing a great user experience.

One thing we firmly believe in here at IntuitionHQ is learning from experience. We always try to share our views on all things usability, but often there is a lot of value in hearing what others have to offer.

Following along with this idea, we’ve decided to put together a series of interviews with professionals in the usability and user experience design areas so we can all learn from their experiences.

Today we’re featuring the first of those interviews, with Jon Phillips – formerly of Spyre Studios, along with a range of other sites as he explains in the interview below – clearly a very busy man.

I think he has some very interesting insights into the worlds of design, usability and user experience, and so without further ado:

An interview with Jon Phillips

I think UX and usability are not optional. If you design for the web and have no idea what usability or user experience means, you need to start reading and learning—fast! - Jon Phillips

Would you give us a brief introduction of yourself?

Hi, I’m Jon Phillips, I’m from Montreal, Canada. I design websites, consult and work with companies and online publishers on content creation, website design, UX and usability. I also write a personal blog where I share my thoughts on design, UX, technology and sometimes photography.

As far back as I can remember I have always been interested in various creative outlets, from music to typography, design and writing. In fact I’ve been a guitarist for over 17 years now and I guess you could say that designing websites is, in some ways, an extension of this in terms of creativity.

Being in a band is also very similar to running a business, and solving problems is something you need to work on every single day to keep the ship afloat.

I started designing websites about 7 years ago for friends at first until I realized I could do this for a living and started learning more and increased my customer base as well as improved my skills (something you always need to keep on improving).

While I love designing and writing markup & CSS, what I enjoy most is solving problems and figuring out the hows and whys of how things work and how people interact with them. Finding a viable solution to a UX problem is what I enjoy most.

I think UX and usability are not optional. If you design for the web and have no idea what usability or user experience means, you need to start reading and learning—fast!

Why do you think usability and user experience are important?

I think that no matter what your job title is, whether you’re a designer, a developer or whatever else people call themselves these days (ninjas and rockstars?), usability and user experience go hand in hand with everything else you do. Similar to the ‘should web-designers know how to code’ debate that we seem to hear about all the time, I think all designers should have more than just a basic understanding of usability and UX in order to completely fulfill their role.

UX is related to pretty much everything we do. It is what defines a great website from a bad one, it’s what people perceive and feel and how they interact with your interface.

Designers and developers are not the only ones who need to understand what makes a great user experience. Artists, business owners, project managers and even musicians and movie producers, to a certain extent, need at least some basic understanding of usability and UX in order to satisfy the needs, feelings and goals of their clients, fans, shareholders, partners, etc

Any words of wisdom to people learning about UX and usability?

Always keep learning and improving your skills and understand what makes a great user experience (quick tip: don’t take anything for granted). Don’t forget that amazing Photoshop skills won’t help much when faced with a usability problem to solve.

Also, while there’s a ton of design blogs out there with some great tips and tricks about usability and UX, what you want in order to get a deeper understanding is not just tips and tricks, you’ll want to read articles, studies, personal experiences from people in the field, books and even go to conferences and seminars.

I personally really enjoy reading case studies from web-designers on how they solved certain problems—I prefer reading about the reasons behind a design decision rather than the technologies used to make it possible.

Favorite sites or resources you’d like to share.

After reading everything ever written by Jacob Nielsen, Steve Krug and Luke Wroblewski, there’s the obvious sources like Twitter, Facebook and Google+ where you can get a great deal of information about UX, usability and design—granted, not always the best advice, but they’re great tools for finding other resources.

We want to thank Jon for his insights, and for being kind enough to share his experiences with the community. If you’d like to read more from him, you can find his blog at blog.jonphillips.ca or follow him on Twitter @JoPhillips.

What do you think?

How does this line up with your experience? What was your favorite part of this interview? Who do you think we should interview in the future? We’d love to hear your feedback in the comments below, on Twitter @IntuitionHQ, or at Facebook.com/IntuitionHQ.

As you may or may not have noticed, we are quite prolific Twitter users here at IntuitionHQ. We love to share everything and anything related to usability and user experience, and judging from our 5000+ Twitter followers (and 700+ on our Facebook page), you’ve enjoyed reading it as well.

Thanks to our favorite Twitter tool, Buffer, we can even view analytics of all of our Tweets, and from that we’ve found our top 60 posts from the past few months.

All of these have been retweeted and clicked many times – with the most popular post garnering more than 1000 clicks thanks to a couple of (well, 30+) great retweets. We’ve also added a summary of the most popular sites at the end of the post which anyone with an interest in usability and user experience should really keep an eye on.

These post are in no particular order, but all are worth a look. Without further ado:

A well illustrated post on icon design, and what makes them good or bad

Great sites on Usability and User Experience

From that giant collection of resources, we’ve crunched the numbers and found which sites were the most popular with our readers over the past few months. This is how those numbers broke down for the top sites:

The IntuitionHQ Blog – 9 posts. Unsurprisingly perhaps, as we often share our own links, and we also write a lot about Usability and User Experience, the IntuitionHQ Blog (RSS Feed) was the most featured site in our links. You can follow us on Twitter @IntuitionHQ

UXMovement – 5 posts. UXMovement consistently has a range of great posts which are short and to the point with really useful information. Follow them on Twitter @UXMovement

Userfocus – 3 posts. Userfocus is another consistent resource for all things usability, and a knack for writing great posts. Follow them on Twitter @UserFocus

Hongkiat – 3 posts. Hongkiat features a whole range of different posts, including regular posts on usability and related tools. Follow them on Twitter @Hongkiat

The Contrast Blog – 2 posts. The Contrast Blog is a personal favorite of mine; it’s well designed and well written, and although not as prolific posters as some of the sites featured here, the posts are always worth a read. Follow @Contrast on Twitter for more.

UXfortheMasses – 2 posts. Like the Contrast blog, not super frequent posters, but always high quality, and a great reshare value. Check them out on Twitter @NeilTurnerUX

Some further recommendations

There are a whole range of other sites with frequent great posts on Usability and UX that are also worth a look, but that we haven’t tweeted as much over the past few months. We highly recommend you check out the following:

We hope you liked that roundup

Hopefully that is enough good resources to keep you going for some time. If you have other sites you’d like to see us Tweeting in the future, or other great links that we should see, please let us know in the comments below.

If you’ve got some value from this post, we’d love you to leave a comment, share this post using the buttons below, or follow us on Twitter, Facebook or our RSS feed.

Thanks very much for dropping by, and thanks to everyone who puts all of these great sites together and writes so many fantastic, fascinating posts. Cheers.

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